Ethics Policy of Journal of Competitiveness

Editors’ and the editing team’ duties and responsibilities

must use CrossCheck to screen for unoriginal material before peer-review process and at any point during the peer-review process;

keep and promote ethical policies of the journal;

ensure the confidentiality of the review process for both sides involved;

do not disclose any information regarding a submitted manuscript to anyone other than the corresponding Author, Reviewers, potential Reviewers, other editorial advisers, and the Publisher, when appropriate;

make a decision about publication or rejecting the paper according the scientific importance/quality, interest to readers, Reviewers’ comments and the related legal requirements (i.e. plagiarism, breach of copyright etc.);

communicate politely with the authors about their paper, checking the compliance with all ethical requirements;

preserve anonymity of reviewers;

remove an identification of the authorship before the manuscripts are submitted for a critical review process;

reserve the right of making minor amendments to the text or return it back to the author for further revision.

Reviewers' duties and responsibilities

Reviewers are obligated:

to maintain the confidentiality of the review process;

to have the objective judgement about any paper suggested for their review;

to have no conflict of interest with respect to the research, the authors, and/or the research funders;

to alert immediately the journal editor about any real or potential competing interest that could affect the independent review;

not to use any part of the material obtained for blind review in their own publications or unpublished research studies without proper citing;

to have no attempts to determine the authorship of the suggested for review text or contact the probable authors directly.

Authors' duties and responsibilities

Authors should ensure that:

the paper are original and written by them;

they agree for minor corrections of the contents, including the title, phrasing, style etc.;

the paper has not been published in any other journal and has been submitted for consideration only to this journal;

the data has been obtained by the authors directly or they have all legal permissions to use the data obtained from private businesses or other independent sources;

the data is original and not manipulated;

all sources used in paper are clearly cited;

the paper does not break any copyrights of others;

the paper includes funding acknowledgment, in case the paper was supported by an institution or grant;

there is no conflict of interest between the coauthors or with third parties;

addition, deletion, or order rearrangement of the authors’ names in the authorship list are approved in advance by the whole team;

they contact the Editor to correct any errors upon their discovery immediately, no later than the text is published online;

authorship of the paper is accurately stated, all authors must sign the statement as their agreement to publication of the paper in this particular journal;

authors are obliged to participate in the peer-review process, responding timely and politely to all comments of the reviewers; if the authors agree to make changes – they must provide the corrections in a timely manner; if the authors do not agree with reviewers’ recommendations or other remarks – objections with a detailed explanation must be provided;

the right to use the paper is transferred to the publisher (according to CC BY 4.0).

The Editorial Board, office and reviewers’ team are doing their best to duly follow the guidance of COPE in all editorial proceedings. We strongly recommend to all our current and potential authors, prior to submitting the text for blind review, to visit this site and get acquainted with the internationally acknowledged rules and best practices: www.publicationethics.org

The Editorial Board of “Journal of Competitiveness” follows the rules on academic writing and academic ethics, according to the work by Miguel Roig (2003, 2006): Avoiding plagiarism, self-plagiarism, and other questionable writing practices: A guide to ethical writing, available online at https://ori.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/plagiarism.pdf

PEER-REVIEW PROCESS

The editor and the members of the Editorial Office at the Journal of Competitiveness pay close attention to strict observation of the principles of scientific and publishing ethical codes. Before the manuscripts are submitted for a critical review process, all the information that would enable any identification of authorship is removed. Authors are supposed send the manuscripts to the Editorial Office together with their signed authors’ statement (signed by all coauthors on the same page) by which they acknowledge both the originality and authorship of their work. Submitted manuscript is presented by the Editorial Office to a liable editor who, after evaluating the quality of the article, makes a decision on its further processing to blind peer-review and appoints at least two independent reviewers, usually two foreign reviewers and one domestic reviewer. Those manuscripts that passed the peer-review process and are thus recommended for publishing are sent, no-name, no affiliation and without acknowledgment, to the Editorial Board for a final approval to be published in the following issue of the Journal of Competitiveness.
The right of the final decision on publishing manuscripts in the Journal of Competitiveness is reserved to the Editorial Board. The Editorial Board also reserves the right of refusal to publish a manuscript.

We strongly believe that an authentic text is an essential part of the publication of a high quality research article. We use anti-plagiarism software Crossref Similarity Check.

The “authorship” when someone is added to the list of coauthors but who has not been directly involved in the process of research and/or writing this particular paper is not permitted. It is also forbidden not to include the author who has been involved in the research and/or writing the paper. Individuals who have contributed to the final version of a paper indirectly (providing some sort of assistance) can be mentioned in the acknowledgement lines but should not be treated as coauthors.

Any accusation in plagiarism or self-plagiarism made to the journal will be immediately investigated by the editing team. All authors of the paper will be contacted and the explanation will be requested, if the accusation is found to be reasonable. If the explanation provided by the author/coauthors is not satisfactory, the Editor of the journal has the right to reject the paper and no future submissions from the same authors would be accepted at any time.

If someone has detected any plagiarism piece in any issue or has some other questions concerning the ethical policy, of the journal, please contact the editor: redakce@cjournal.cz